Saturday, 9 May 2015

'Bad news, I'm dead!', says Lucia Joyce (Maria Tucci) in the opening scene of 'Lucia's Chapter's of Coming Forth by Day'. This latest Wake inspired play, by the New York theatre company, Mabou Mines, has been brought to my home town as part of this year's Brighton Festival. I went to see it at the Theatre Royal on Thursday.

It's written and directed by Sharon Fogarty who, like Olwen Fouéré in her play riverrun, has been inspired by the parallels between Finnegans Wake and the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The original title of this guidebook to the afterlife was
'Chapters of Coming Forth by Day'. The Egyptians saw death as the
beginning of a long journey through a dark and dangerous underworld,
which would end with them 'coming forth by day' into a new life. Joyce associated this with what happens to us every night when we
sleep, and so Finnegans Wake, a night book, is full of echoes of the Book of the Dead.

The play places Lucia in the afterlife, with her own personal Book of the Dead. But she's also metaphorically dead because she's spent almost fifty years in mental institutions. There's a strong sense of entrapment. She's unable to escape from the institution and from the shadow of her famous father, James Joyce (Paul Kandel), who appears for most of the play in silhouette behind a screen. The men she falls in love with, such as Samuel Beckett, are more interested in her father than in her. She is frustrated in love and in her attempts to express herself as an artist.

Lucia was silenced in life and even after death, when her nephew destroyed all her letters. So the play, like Carol Loeb Schloss's biography,Lucia Joyce:To Dance in the Wake, is an attempt to give her back her voice. There's wonderfully atmospheric music and sound from Carter Burwell, who scores the Coen Brothers' films, and dynamic visual projections on multiple screens by Julie Archer. At one point Lucia is completely engulfed in projected text. Jim Clayburg has designed the set with a cantilevered chair, on which Lucia sometimes takes off, swooping through the air.

The play was originally created as a collaboration with the late Ruth Maleczech, who, according to Fogarty, was 'a fierce and defiant Lucia with a Vesuvian anger simmering away.'You can see from the trailer on Vimeo that she was also very funny. Maria Tucci gives us a more fragile and child-like Lucia.

The text includes quotations from the Wake, reflecting Lucia's state of mind. At one point, the whole stage is lit up by flashes of lightning and, in a rage, Lucia shouts out the mighty thunderword from the book's opening page:

Maria Tucci and Paul Kandel as Lucia and James Joyce, from the theatre programme

In my favourite part of the play, Joyce comes out from behind the screen, to deliver to his daughter the lovely lyrical passage in which Nuvoletta, the cloud girl, falls to earth as a drop of rain:

'Then Nuvoletta reflected for
the last time in her little long life and she made up all her myriads
of drifting minds in one. She cancelled all her engauzements. She
climbed over the bannistars; she gave a childy cloudy cry: Nuée! Nuée!
A lightdress fluttered. She was gone. And into the river that had been a
stream (for a thousand of tears had gone eon her and come on her and
she was stout and struck on dancing and her muddied name was
Missisliffi) there fell a tear, a singult tear, the loveliest of all
tears (I mean for those crylove fables fans who are ‘keen’ on the
prettypretty commonface sort of thing you meet by hopeharrods) for it
was a leaptear. But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping as
though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh! I’se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!'

The last line here is spoken by Lucia.

This feels like a description of Lucia, with 'all her myriads of drifting minds'. But, although she was a model for Nuvoletta, Joyce wrote this passage in 1927, three years before his daughter became ill. Joyce believed that Finnegans Wake had the power to predict the future. Had he predicted Lucia's illness here?

At the time, Lucia was 'struck on dancing'. She was making a career for herself as an avant-garde dancer in Paris. Here she is dancing at the Bullier Ball in Paris in 1929, when the audience shouted, 'Nous réclamons l'irlandaise!' (We're calling for the Irish girl!)

She's wearing a shimmering silver fish costume she made herself. 'It was in silver sequins edged with green. One leg was covered to the heel and the other came right through the costume, so that when she put one behind the other, she created the illusion of a fish tail. Green and silver were entwined in her hair.' James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, p 110.

Lucia also speaks the Wake's ending, as Anna Livia, the river Liffey, flowing out of Dublin to unite with her father, the sea.

'And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father,
my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him,
the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and
I rush, my only, into your arms.'

Spoken by the dead Lucia Joyce, with her father standing beside her, this passage takes on a whole new meaning.

This was the very first time that Tucci has performed the role and the production was a little unsteady on opening night. But what a thrill to hear again the words of Finnegans Wake spoken on stage.

RTE have also made an excellent documentary about her, which you can listen to here. The radio documentary, like Carol Loeb Schloss's book and the Mabou Mines play, claims that Joyce's linguistic experiments were inspired by Lucia's fractured language. In fact, he'd been writing the Wake for seven years before she became ill. Her breakdown was one of the factors that triggered his own writing block in the 1930s when, as he wrote, 'the words came out like drops of blood.'

Monday, 4 May 2015

Today is the 76th anniversary of the publication of Finnegans Wake! The big celebratory event is the publication, online and free, of a musical recreation of the Wake, 'in its whole wholume' by Waywords and Meansigns.

Waywords and Meansigns, based in Canada, was created by Derek Pyle, who explained in an interview with Bibliokept that the idea came to him exactly a year ago today:

'In 2014 I organized a party to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the publication of Finnegans Wake. To celebrate we decided to listen to Patrick Healy’s audiobook recording of Finnegans Wake,
which is 20-odd hours long. The party, as you can imagine, lasted all
weekend — we actually listened to Johnny Cash’s unabridged reading of
the New Testament that weekend too. There was very little sleep, and
fair amount of absinthe....During the party I started wondering about other ways you could
perform the text, and that’s when I came up with the idea of approaching
musicians to create a new kind of audiobook.

As it turns out, a lot of people seemed to think my idea was a good
one. We’ve had no shortage of musicians willing to contribute, including
some really cool cats like Tim Carbone of Railroad Earth and bassist
Mike Watt, who currently plays in Iggy Pop’s band The Stooges.'

So the book's seventeen chapters were each assigned to a different musician, given complete freedom, apart from the rule that 'the chapter's words must be audible, unabridged, and more or less in their original order'.

As you'd expect, there are many different styles of performance, ranging from the Western Mass art punk band, Dérive, who give us an edgy rendition of 'the washers at the Ford' to the New Zealand saxophonist, Hayden Chisolm, who provides a much more restful, and almost hypnotic, version of the pub chapter.

READING THE WAKE ALOUD

There's an interview with PQ and Steve 'Fly' Pratt, who's recorded the Jaun chapter, on the RAWIlluminations site. They have some great advice about reading the book aloud:

PQ: 'The experience certainly confirmed the text's inherent musical rhythms,
it really comes to life when read aloud. And last but not least, it's
often said Finnegans Wake is a book for the ear but it's also a book for the mouth. You'll never utter anything like it.'

FLY: 'Perhaps think of the text as-if it were an interactive word
game. Something you play. And to repeat, read it aloud and discover the
tongue-twisting turns in every line. Take it slowly. Jump to any page,
get your kit off and dive in. If that does not turn you on, the next
time you get totally trashed, or feel a case of the giggles coming on,
pick up the good book and prolong the enjoyment. Simple.'

PQ: 'Build up a passion and interest for it first. Read some books
about it, get to know how bizarre and irrational it is. You can't try
to just slog through it like any other big book. It's designed to
shatter your logical mind and drown you in a variegated cacophony of
lingual sounds from dozens of languages. Also, yes it's difficult but
with enough time you will find the book will teach you how to read it.'

Joyce with his guitar in 1915

FINNEGANS WAKE IS A MUSICAL BOOK

Finnegans Wake is the perfect book for this project, because Joyce, a gifted musician, wrote it as if it was music. For example, he described the Anna Livia chapter, which he recorded, as 'an attempt to subordinate words to the rhythm of water.'

Joyce's title for his great dusk piece was a musical one, 'A Phoenix Park Nocturne'.He uses many musical techniques, such as the Wagnerian leitmotif, a short, recurring phrase, associated with a particular person, place or idea. So the Anna Livia chapter ends with the phrase 'Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!' (216.04). This is an Anna Liffey river lietmotif, echoed six other times:'wasching the walters of, the weltering walters off. Whyte.' 64.20'and watch her waters of her sillying waters of' 74.29'And his dithering dathering waltzers of. Stright!' 245.22'arride the winnerful wonders off, the winnerful wonnerful wanders off' 265.15'baffling with the walters of, hoompsydoompsy walters of. High!' 373.06'Amingst the living waters of, the living in giving waters of. Tight!' 462.04

Finnegans Wake is named after a song, and is full of hundreds of other songs, whose rhythms and lyrics Joyce plays with. The book even includes this song written by Joyce himself.

Setting the whole of Finnegans Wake to music is a mighty achievement. Even more impressively, Waywords and Meansigns are planning to do the whole thing again later this year with different contributors! Here's how you can get involved.